This
book examines the interactions between social and legal norms through
the troubled story of racially restrictive covenants in American
residential communities. Racial covenants emerged in new high-end new
developments soon after 1900 and then spread to many middle- and some
working-class white neighborhoods. The book argues that these covenants
were particularly important in loose-knit urban white communities, which
otherwise lacked the social cohesion to maintain segregation. Racial
restrictions in those areas coordinated white resistance to integration
while signaling minority entrants to keep out. "Norm entrepreneurs" -
developers, brokers, and lenders - believed that racial covenants
protected housing values, and these actors helped to turn racial
restrictions into a general norm in white neighborhoods. In 1948 the
Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that racial covenants were
unenforceable by courts, but their influence waned only gradually.

Legal
norms shadowed racial restrictions on property from their origins
onward. For several decades, proponents and courts steered around both
Constitutional and property-law obstacles, but remaining legal
weaknesses permitted “norm-busting” individuals and institutions to pick
away at racial covenants, bolstering their case with an increasingly
sympathetic anti-racist moral message. Even after Shelley and later
antidiscrimination laws, however, racial covenants lived on in real
estate documents, and for a considerable time they continued to send
signals both to white residents and to outsiders. As a concluding coda,
the book describes today’s legal efforts to renounce the
now-discredited norms of racial covenants where they still lurk in
property records.